The fourth generation of cellular telephony (LTE), based on OFDMA, is being deployed worldwide. LTE has significant improvements for end users like lower latency and higher average and peak downlink and uplink rates. Nevertheless, the adoption of mobile telephony is growing so fast that the operators' access and backhaul networks will soon become bottlenecks, and it is also expected that this problem will worsen with the emergence of ultra-dense cellular networks based on 5G. To alleviate this problem, operators are relying on WiFi as a complementary access technology to offload some traffic from their cellular networks. Thus, in densely populated areas there is currently a variety of access networks available and this trend is likely to continue in the future.
Some access networks (cellular, WiFi) may be better for certain kinds of traffic. To that end the 3GPP, the consortium behind LTE, has defined the Access Network Discovery and Selection Function (ANDSF). ANDSF assists LTE terminals in the discovery of non-3GPP access networks (e.g. WiFi and WiMAX). It consists of information on alternative access networks that is stored on a server and fetched by the terminal to assist it in its connection process. However, ANDSF rules are static in the sense that they will be applied for an entire traffic session regardless of the network dynamics, like the number of terminals connected to a specific access point.
Thus there is a need for proactive congestion control consisting of two complementary steps: on the one hand, it should provide the means to predict the future state of the network in order to anticipate potential problems; on the other hand, and depending on the prediction, it should allow to change the network configuration in a convenient way.
In the present invention we disclose systems and methods to integrate wireless user terminals with multihoming capabilities into Software Defined Network (SDN) architectures. This will allow SDN network controllers to issue access network selection commands to user terminals relying on predictions based on terminal-side information, thus supporting global network optimization. In the present invention, unlike in previous work, wireless terminal interface configuration is an integral part of the architecture.